This morning, I experienced the nerd equivalent of a Black Friday $50 iPad sale. At 07:00 CET, the first batch of the much-anticipated Raspberry Pi went on sale, and while Raspberry Pi itself was very properly prepared, the two large international retailers actually selling the device weren't - despite warnings from Raspberry Pi about the enormous amount of traffic that would come their way, the two sites crumbled to dust within seconds. There's good news too - the cheaper model A has seen its RAM doubled at no additional cost.

This is probably one of the most desired geek items, and they decide to widely publicise a launch time which creates a DDOS on their sellers sites. One of these sites isn't even accepting orders, even though they initially announced that both sites have them available to buy.

Had they not announced a stupid time early in advance and got both sites to only take pre-orders from the start - this would've been a far smoother launch. Telling everyone that they've got a big announcement at 6AM, with everyone hoping to one of the 10k people to get the first to buy one - it was just a disaster waiting to happen.

I just hope that Farrell/RS can turn things around, take a decent amount of pre-orders and sell them as soon as possible.